Leigh Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School

Music Intent:     

At Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School, we aim to engage, motivate and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement.

Music teaching at Sacred Heart aims to follow the requirements of the National Curriculum for Music; providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum; ensuring the progressive development of musical concepts, knowledge and skills.  Music is a unique way of communicating, it is a vehicle for personal expression, creativity and it can play an important part in personal and cognitive development. Our school aims to reflect the culture and society that we live in, and so the teaching and learning of music enables children to better understand the world they live in. At Sacred Heart we recognise that music can be a highly academic and demanding subject but we also aim to make it a creative and enjoyable activity. Furthermore, music also plays an important part in helping children to feel part of a community and so we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music both in class and to an audience through assemblies, concerts and performances. Lessons enable children to develop their skills, appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, and begin to make judgements about the quality of music. 

Implementation:

Music teaching at Sacred Heart will deliver the requirements of the National Curriculum through the scheme ’Sing up’. Sing up is a progressive scheme which has units lasting six weeks and three weeks. Six week units are based on a song, the musical learning flows from the features of the piece whilst. These unite integrate singing and playing, listening and appraising as well as some improvisation and composition. The three week units have a heavier focus on listening/appraising and improvising/composing. The improvising and composing units enable students to develop their skills and their creative voice. The listening and appraising units vary, some have an active focus on ways to listen other have more of an emphasis on the social, culture and history of music.

Music is taught throughout school each week. Pupils in Early Years take part in a 30 minute lesson, pupils in KS1 40 minutes lesson and 50 minutes for KS2.

Children in Year 4 are part of the wider opportunities project where they learn either clarinet  or flute. The children are taught by professional musicians for the year and perform at termly concerts for their families and peers in school. Children are exposed to a range of live music throughout their school life, this can by attending concerts, performances in school and the theatre.

Music teaching at Sacred Heart is practical and engaging. A variety of teaching approaches and activities are provided based on teacher judgement and pupil ability. Lessons typically involve a combination of the following;

Alongside our curriculum provision for music, pupils also have the opportunity to participate in additional 1:1 music teaching. Pupils are offered the opportunity to learn a musical instrument with peripatetic teachers. Our peripatetic music teaching is organised by Wigan Music Service, where lessons are provided weekly for a small set fee paid by the child’s parent or carer.  A range of instruments are offered but our children frequently choose Instruments in the past have included: guitar, piano, keyboard and strings. Children are encouraged to perform when possible in school.

Pupils in Key Stage two also have the opportunity to join the school choir. The school choir perform in the community at Christmas as well as leading singing in church and at services.

 Impact:

Our music Curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression and build on and embed current skills. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills in the different musical components and like in other subjects, discreet teaching of vocabulary also forms part of the units of work.

If children are achieving the knowledge and skills in lessons, then they are deemed to be making good or better progress.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

·         Pupil discussions and interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).

·         Annual reporting and tracking of standards across the curriculum.

·         Photo evidence and images of the pupils practical learning.

·         A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes.